In the production and packing of bagged products, wherein the bagged product has a somewhat irregular geometry and may contain frangible products, such as potato chips, it is desirable to pack the bags in cartons in such a manner that the bags are in one or more columns of a particular number of vertically oriented bags. The bags should be adjacent to each other, without being so tightly compressed that undue breakage is apt to occur during packing or shipping of the product.
Bagged products, such as potato chips, commonly come off a bagging machine onto a conveyor belt with each bag lying horizontally on the belt, and space apart some distance from the next bag. It has been customary for workers to stand around a rotary packing table, and manually re-arrange the bags into vertical orientation and juxtaposition to other bags. The collected and arranged column of bags is then manually placed in a shipping carton.
The necessity for the worker to gather the bags together and correctly orient them has led to a number of difficulties. The first, of course, is the time required for such operations. The time required for manual orientation of the bags decreases productivity and/or increases labor costs. Moreover, the possibility of slippage of one or more of the bags, and the possibility of breakage of the contents due to handling of the bags, are additional troublesome factors.
In any successful attempt to automate the foregoing operations, several problems need to be recognized and addressed. First, the arrival time of the bags on the conveyor belt from the bagging machine is somewhat irregular, so it is necessary to provide some means for compensating for this irregularity. Second, any mechanism for vertically orienting the bags must take into account the breakable nature of the product within the bags, and handle them gently enough that undue breakage does not occur in the orientation process. Third, in the assembly of the bags in a column of vertically oriented bags, the bags need to be maintained adjacent to each other, but still not be pressed so close together that breakage of the contents will occur. Fourth, care must be taken that the orienting mechanism carries out its functions without interfering with the movement of succeeding bags coming from the bagging machine, and without damaging the contents of any bag which has arrived at the apparatus while the mechanism is in the process of orienting the preceding bag. These and other problems are recognized and overcome by the present invention.